


Shed

by magicgenetek



Series: Molting Verse [2]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Body Horror, Enemies to Friends, Espionage, Found Family, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Past Brainwashing, Recovery, Slice of Life, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Supernatural Dysphoria, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-18
Updated: 2016-09-30
Packaged: 2018-08-09 12:05:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 14,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7801228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magicgenetek/pseuds/magicgenetek
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I ended up stumbling where I wasn’t supposed to during Switzerland and became – this.” You flex your hand and let the nanites come thick as swarming gnats. “A corpse kept alive with science.”</p><p>“That’s not all you have to be. You can shed one life and live another, as I did,” Hanzo says.</p><p>You snort. “And what? Live in this shed in a fishing village for the rest of my life? Become a yakuza? No thank you.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Pacific Ocean; August 2076

**Author's Note:**

> Shed:
> 
> 1\. verb: allow (its skin or shell) to come off, to be replaced by another one that has grown underneath; discard (something undesirable, superfluous, or outdated).
> 
> 2\. noun: a simple roofed structure, typically made of wood or metal, used as a storage space, a shelter for animals, or a workshop.

The first sign that this mission is going to be a shitstorm is that you don’t get any bars on your phone. There’s only one person you ever call on it, but you think Amélie would get a kick about hearing how miserable this tanker is. You thought the cramped helicopter you arrived in was bad - until you opened the door and your mask lenses immediately fogged up from the humidity. The smell of fish and rust slapped you in the face as you looked at the aging boat; you’re pretty sure that the anti-omnic cannons that dot the ship’s deck are older than some of your handlers.

The second sign is when you’re not allowed to come into the negotiating room with your handlers. It’s a good move on the yakuza’s part since you’re actually here to steal the tanker – the Shimadas aren’t as strong as they used to be. You know that. You were there when the snowflake landed to launch the avalanche. Nevertheless, you stay outside and wait for the shit to hit the fan.

The third sign is when the shit hits the storm front. The fans. Whatever. You hear gunshots. Silence. More gunshots.

Then two spectral dragons shoot through the wall and tears two of your handlers to shreds with teeth the size of knives. They dissipate into a mist of blood.

Some of your handlers cry out. You don’t. Violence can’t shock you these days. The majority of your life is ashes and blood, now, and it’s not like the dragons could kill you permanently. Not when you’re this _thing_ now.

So the chase begins. They lead. You follow. Your handlers spread through the boat as you chase the Shimada with the dragons; some stay by your side while others slip into the narrow corridors of the tanker. You hear distant sounds of violence where Talon meets the yakuza’s crew; blood joins rust and salt water in the air.

You’re here to steal this tanker, the crew on it, and any Shimadas with dragons who tagged along. So you chase the archer who plants arrows into the chinks between your handlers’ body armor, turning into a swarm of nanites when they shoot arrows around a corner and into your core. They dance through the pipes – you can barely keep up, and you’re not exactly slow.

Your heart is racing.

This is fun.

You hear a familiar voice speaking in clipped Japanese, and it’s not moving. You lower your guns and bounce off one wall, two, three to clatter into a closet. You look for green lights and gleaming metal.

You find a cell phone.

An arrow buries itself in your elbow and you yelp. You slam the door in front of you and wait a dozen heartbeats for the archer to attack again, but no more arrows hit.

You breathe in. you breathe out. You test your arm. You’re in no danger of dying, but your fingers aren’t responding. A clean shot through your tendons – a disabling blow for anyone who couldn’t regenerate their body from the cells up. You break the outer parts of the arrow off so it won’t get in the way of your remaining arm. Then you pick the cell phone off the floor and navigate it with your claws.

The screen is still lit up with Voicemails. You scroll back to the beginning and hit play.

“Honorable wolf, we’ve received new information on Talon’s agent, Reaper-dono. He’s former Overwatch. If you encounter him, try and take that man alive if possible. The recent offer the head got is most certainly an ambush. Be careful.”

You scroll back to the beginning.

“Honorable wolf, we’ve rec – Reaper-dono - former Overwatch – take him alive if possible – ”

You scroll back.

“ Reaper-dono – take him alive - ”

And again.

“ – take him alive - ”

They knew this was a trap. Which means this is also a trap. And.

Genji had said Reaper-dono, attaching the antique honorific to your name as if you were a lord in one of his Warring Kingdoms video games. Just like he had the last time you saw him, dropping him off in Beijing to discover himself away from Overwatch’s influence. You wonder if it’s still him covering unwarranted respect with half a joke.

You listen to his message seven more times before one of your handlers opens the door. You shove the phone into your pocket as your handler berates you for losing the trail, for letting your arm get shot full of holes. You hoist a shotgun with your good arm and roll your shoulders.

Mr. Wolf wouldn’t be far away. A relative of Genji’s with two dragons codenamed wolf equaled the sneakiest little shit a little bird ever told you about.

And wouldn’t you know it, someone’s left body parts pointing you in the right direction. The group of you follow, you in the lead to soak up damage. You’re the only one in Talon who can come back from the dead once a day, after all.

The body parts lead to one of the cargo holds. Boxes and crates of various sizes turn it into a maze. You flip on your night vision goggles and take the lead.

An arrow pins one handler to the wall by the throat. You become mist and jump up to the top of one of the taller crates. The archer is hopping away from where the arrow came, but you see him and start hopping toward him.

“Shimada Hanzo! I’m here to challenge the brother killer who shot down the sparrow before he could leave the nest!” you shout in Japanese. Your accent is shit, but the way the archer spins towards you means that you said it well enough to be understood.

Which means that your handlers will be safe from him, for now.

But then an arrow almost nails you in the face. Well. This was not a well thought out plan, you think, and you start zig-zagging from crate to crate to avoid some of the arrows.

You hope you got handlers competent enough to take advantage of your distraction. You don’t bother to keep track of them anymore. Their names and faces blur together like jars of mayonnaise in an abandoned supermarket.

Arrows fly. Shots ring. You don’t get close to Shimada, but you can herd him into a corner. You hear your handlers chasing him. They’ll catch him soon – and that thought is enough to make you mess up while shadow-stepping and stumble – that’s enough for Shimada to shoot three arrows down your leg - that’s enough to make you fall off the crate and hit the floor with a clang.

It hurts. Your elbow is pins and needles where the nanites are repairing it; your leg has three arrows sticking out of the shin and it just hurts, cutting through the dull ache in your joints with electric fangs. Hissing, you roll onto your side; wince as your rib cage twinges. You’ll be lucky if there aren’t any fractures.

It takes time to get back on your feet in the dark and stumble toward the noise of battle. One of your handlers waves you towards him; he looks untouched. “Took you long enough,” he says.

“Back in black,” you quip. “Did you corner him?”

“We will soon enough.”

The two of you find the Shimada with his back literally pressed against the corner of the room, arrow nocked and ready in his bow. You swear you can see his dragon tattoo squirming on his skin. Three handlers surround him, stun guns at the ready, but none prepared to strike first and get an arrow through the neck like the bodies at their feet.

“Can’t believe a short fucker like him managed to this much damage,” the closest handler mutters.

“Someone called in and told him we were coming,” you say.

“How do you know that?”

“He dropped his phone.”

“Give it here.”

You reluctantly hand your handler Shimada’s phone. The other handlers and Shimada stay frozen in place, weapons at the ready, as Genji’s tinny voice fills the air. You watch sweat drip past Shimada’s eye and down his cheek. He blinks rapidly. You wonder when Genji decided to trust him again.

You’re so focused on him that you don’t realize your handler’s gone for the remote to your shock collar until it’s too late.

“Augh!” You fall onto your uninjured knee. It’s more of a warning shock than anything else, but your body is already a shell of pain. If injuries don’t stop piling up, you’re going to have to regenerate your body. “What was that _for_?!”

“Who else could have leaked that information?”

“I don’t plan these jobs! You point and I shoot!”

Another shock. You wheeze. Your handler snaps, “You let 76 get away with information last week!”

“I did not! He got away on his own! He’s more competent than you idiots, which is why I’m the only one who can consistently catch him - ”

The next shock sends you to the ground in a wave of pain; you smack your injured arm on the ground and then that sends a shockwave of pain on top of the first one, and you barely keep from shouting.

“Is this,” wheeze, “really,” wheeze, “the time for this conversation?” You roll onto your side and push yourself up with your good leg. You don’t mean to catch Shimada’s eye, but you do. He’s doing the thing that Genji used to do, where he’d judge everyone in the room while keeping his face perfectly composed.

But _you_ know.

And god help you but you can’t help a laugh.

The handlers who don’t have Shimada pinned in a corner give each other disgusted, knowing looks. You’re a headcase and you always have been, to them. But you can delude yourself into seeing something like sympathy on the void cliff of Shimada’s face.

“It’s right,” one handler says. “We can finish this later. Let’s capture Shimada and get out of here.” He nudges you with his boot. “Get up.”

“Right, right,” you say. “Why are we even capturing him? I thought we wanted to wreck the yakuza.”

“We wrecked Overwatch by using you,” your handler says. “He can destroy his own organization from the inside out too.”

“Great plan,” you hiss as you stand up. “Worked really well, didn’t it? Except he’s just as much trouble as his brother, isn’t he? How exactly do you plan on capturing him without getting half of us killed? I can’t exactly block a dragon, much less two.”

“Then shoot him before he can use the dragons!”

“Shotguns aren’t great for nonlethal captures! Give me your stun gun.”  
  
“Like hell!”

You facepalm as the handler with the cell phone taunts, “We’ll leave a message for the Overwatch Shimada once we’re gone – he can listen to his brother’s squeals of pain as we head out.”

Shimada moves for the first time since he was cornered: to smirk. “Unlikely.”

“What? You won’t scream?”

“No. Didn’t you wonder why we used this part of the ocean to meet in? The only way you’ll be calling someone is by radio. This is an internet dead zone.”

“You think you’re so smart?! We’ll send your brother the stumps of your fucking legs!”

An internet dead zone. That was why your cell phone didn’t work. They wouldn’t be able to contact the rest of Talon until the boat came out of this dead zone. And if those didn’t work, no one would know if you did _this_ –

Where you raise your shotgun and shred one handler’s head into so much hamburger with a single shot.

You take out both the handlers aiming guns at Shimada before the one next to you shoots your good arm. You snarl and lunge at him, headbutting him even as you feel the signature hotcold impacts of your other handler’s bullets into your lower back.

But their eyes on you means that Shimada can attack.

_“Let the dragon consume you!”_

You let yourself fall to your knees as the dragons rush past you, tearing your remaining handlers into so much meat and bone. Kevlar doesn’t do a lot against a fucking spectral dragon.

You wait for one to devour you. But nothing comes.

You look up to see Shimada walking towards you, bow lowered warily. “You can shoot me if you want,” you say conversationally; pain has wrapped a noose around your throat, but you have lived in pain for years. It can’t do much to stop you now. “Might be better off doing that?  I think I was shot in the kidney. Even if you could get me to a hospital in time, I doubt they could do much to save me.”

“It seems a pity to kill you so soon. The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Hanzo says. He crouches down and helps you sink onto the floor.

Your body usually has a low buzz of pain in your joints, where the nanites heal the wear and tear of movement every time you move. On top of that is three shot out limbs and three holes in your abdomen sending shocks through your body every time you move. It feels good to rest against the cold metal floor.

“ – my brother,” Hanzo says.

You squint through your mask. “Sorry, my head’s not all here. I’m holy now, ha. Repeat that for me?”

“How do you know my brother?” Hanzo asks again. “And…holy?”

“I was part of the Blackwatch team that got him out of Japan,” you explain. There’s not much point in beating around the bush. Genji clearly knows who you are, and your body’s on the verge of disintegrating. Why lie? “Ended up working with him for a few years. He was a good kid. I got pulled into Talon after he left Overwatch. He was the second best cybernetic freak of nature I ever knew. And I’m holy because they shot me full of holes.”

Hanzo’s face is grim.

“That’s funny, right?” you say. “I’m the best cybernetic freak, by the way. You can laugh.”

“You’re losing blood quickly. This is no time to be joking around.”

“This is the best time to be joking around,” you counter. “I’m told that not even children are afraid of me, but I have a reputation to maintain. You can tell Genji I went out laughing. Something cool.”

Hanzo’s still not laughing. “He wouldn’t tell me who you are, but if you were an ally of his then, then your death isn’t something I want to celebrate.”

“Did he finally make up with you?” Hanzo nods. “Ha. Good. He used to say that he thought it was impossible, but he was always too nice for his own good. He missed you.”

Your vision is going blurry. Ha. Death from blood loss. You haven’t had that in a while. Someone must have hit an artery. Hanzo’s face is the only thing you can focus on now.

“Stop looking so concerned. I didn’t take you for another emotional dweeb like your brother, but I was wrong. People die when they are killed. That’s what happens.” You manage a laugh. “If you’re really so sad about me dying, you can do me a favor.”

“Name it.”

“Once I’ve died, throw my body into the ocean. First of all, there are tracking devices in it. Second of all, I don’t want Talon or Overwatch getting their hands on my body. One of me is one more than the world needs.”  And, you think, the nanites won’t be able to stay together under the sheer power of the ocean’s currents. You can finally die permanently. _Finally._

“Done,” Hanzo says. “Can you tell me where they are? I can scatter them to give Talon a hard time.”

You tell him. You close your eyes.

“One more thing,” you breathe.

“Yes?”

“Tell Genji and 76 and Fareeha and the ingrate,” you whisper, “that I’m sorry I couldn’t see them again.”

You let the world fade to black around you as you die.

* * *

 

It starts with the itching pain of the nanites rebuilding you from the cells up. It’s like your stomach is filled to the brim with pins and needles. Your arms and legs.

You wake clawing at your mask as a thousand fire ants crawl around two points in your forehead. It won’t come off. You know it won’t come off. You’ve tried to take it off before. You’re lucky your earlier attempts didn’t shove the nails right into your frontal lobe. But the places where the mask was nailed into your skull burn where nanites try to heal around the nails.

You roll onto your side trying to sneak fingers under your mask to itch at it. You expect the cool concrete of your cell. What you feel is something textured, with enough give in it to give you pause as it rubs against your bare skin.

Clothing. Where’s your clothing? You open your eyes as you roll onto your knees, and the world splotches back into view. You’re wearing a white kimono and your briefs and nothing else. Honeyed sunlight filters through large windows. Birds chirp. Waves crash against surf in earshot. You’re kneeling on clean tatami mats and your bare skin is layering raw muscle over bone as the nanites repair where you were shot.

Genji comes unbidden to mind. At Ana’s funeral. You had made Turkish coffee the way Ana liked. Jesse came hungover. Fareeha had drunk her mother’s coffee with shaking hands and spilled it. Her nice uniform. Genji had laughed. Reassured her.

“In Japanese funerals, the deceased wear white. At least coffee on navy blue won’t stain.”

The deceased wear white.

 The deceased.

You can’t even die right.

One foot supports you. The other does not. It’s riddled with dark blotches where Shimada used you as a pincushion. It’ll take time for the muscle to heal completely. Standing is out of the question. Your hands are useless. You crawl on your elbows and knees. There’s got to be a door somewhere. And an ocean.

You are not going to let someone screw up the funeral you’ve been fantasizing about for months.

After testing the windows and getting your bearings, you find one of those sliding paper and wood doors. You’ve only seen them in the old-fashioned Japanese bathhouses that Genji liked to visit on his birthday.

But. It feels even hotter here than on the tanker.

This isn’t Japan.

Where are you?

You wedge your elbow into the corner and shove the door open.

Shimada is sweeping the floor of a tiny living room. He’s wearing a light yukata. His hair is loose and long. “Is it you kids again? I told you not to come to my house today,” Shimada says in Japanese, twirling the broom as he turns toward your noise.

Then he sees you and stares.

You stare back.

He screams.

You scream.

He hits you in the face with the broom and you go down in one hit. Fuck. Your. Life.


	2. ???, August 2076

Shimada smacks you with the broom a few more times before you manage to wrap your arms around your head to protect it. You curl up on the ground, waiting for the onslaught to stop.

When it does, you don’t uncurl. The broom prods your side cautiously.

“You’re alive?” Shimada asks in English.

“No,” you reply in Japanese. Your accent is shit but Genji did wonders for your vocabulary. “Cyborg, idiot. Can’t die.”

Shimada falls back into Japanese in alarm. “Then why did you tell me to throw you in the ocean?”

“Why do you _think_?”

Shimada doesn’t reply to that. Or he can’t. Instead, he rolls you onto your side and picks you up in a fireman carry. You don’t have the energy to resist, so you let him carry you to wherever.

Wherever is another room behind a sliding door. You see a bookshelf lined with colorful books before he lays you out on – a mattress on the floor. With pillows and blanket. Those old fashioned hotels kept their beds on the floor like this. Genji said his old houses were like this.

“What are you doing?” you ask.

“I’m afraid I can’t let you die,” Hanzo says in English. “I was going to keep the mask on to protect your anonymity in death, but you can’t eat like that, can you?”

“I don’t need to eat.”

“Just like you need to go into the ocean?”

“I’m a dead cyborg. I don’t need food,” you mutter in Japanese, to make a point. “I’m going to mess up your nice bed.”

“No, you’re not,” Hanzo replies. “You were – prepared for the funeral. Your body is clean.”

You look down at your body again. You don’t stink of stale sweat and blood anymore, do you? And although you’re covered in healing injuries, there’s no blood from them. You run a hand through your hair and find it in tight curls rather than the matted mess Talon let it become. Someone cut your hair, and they knew what they were doing.

And you’re wearing a white kimono and briefs and nothing else. “Where’d you get this underwear from? It’s not mine.”

“Bought it from a local fisherman. It’s clean,” Hanzo says.

“You cut out all my tracking microchips?”

“All the ones you told me about. It’s a good thing you were…unconscious at the time,” Hanzo says diplomatically. “It took a while to get the one in your abdominal cavity.”

“That was awful getting implanted.” You remember that through a blur of painkillers and regenerating flesh. Surgeons with blood up to their elbows. You never got the hang of being vivisected. A look inside your kimono proves that yes, there is a healing incision there, along with one on your shoulder, along your leg, the side of your neck, between your shoulder blades – all the chips you’d discovered over ten years in Talon.

“Why go through all that trouble? I was dead. It’d be safer to dump me overboard. I _told_ you to dump me overboard.”

“You may not have intended it, but you saved many lives by turning on your allies on the boat. The rest of Talon’s crew fell like cherry blossoms. It would be disrespectful to not give you a proper cremation and a grave.”

“It was disrespectful to ignore my wish to go into the ocean!” You fall into the _mat_ dialect of Russian in your frustration; the flexible grammar and vocabulary lets you shove 10 fucks and 6 dicks into a 7 word sentence. “Why couldn’t you fucking kill me?”

To your surprise, Shimada swaps to _mat_ with you. “Genji wouldn’t get any closure that way.”

“Genji doesn’t fucking know better -”

“He fucking deserves better from you, after he went to the fucking trouble of asking me to help. Don’t you want to live to see him?”

“Fuck you!” you snap. “I know what you did on Hanamura Bridge! You can’t judge me!”

Hanzo goes very still, the emotion draining from his face. His hand smacks your chest and slams you down against the mattress. He draws a knife with the other hand as he straddles your chest.

“Get the fuck off me!” You try and bat him away, but he ends up pinning your wrists with one hand. You’re still weak from regenerating. There’s little you can do to stop him. “Stop! Don’t fucking touch me!”

The knife moves too fast for your eyes to track. You only realize what he’s doing when you hear metal against hard plastic and feel a sudden loss of pressure on your forehead.

One nail pops out of your mask, your skull. Then the other. Your forehead lights on fire as the nanites swarm to heal the two punctures. You hiss and turn your face away, but Shimada catches your chin and pulls the mask off.

Though it’s humid, your face feels cool after being under the mask for so long. You wheeze as Shimada turns your face left and right to examine it. His fingers scratch against your stubble. Air is wedged in your throat.

“So that’s what you look like,” Hanzo murmurs. “I never did get a good look at your face then.”

“It was the middle of the fucking night in Japan in autumn. It was cold. I can’t help it if you couldn’t notice shit about a foreigner in a scarf and hoodie.”

“Then I’m doubly beholden to you,” Shimada says, swapping back to English. “I can’t let you kill yourself after you saved me.”

“It was nothing. Genji wanted to kill you with his own hands then. Couldn’t do that if you were floating down the river,” you mutter. Shimada gets off you and you curl into a protective ball on your side. “Just. Fucking leave me alone.”

“Of course.” Shimada tugs a blanket out from under you and drapes it over your shoulder. “You can stay in this room for now. I’ll check in on you in an hour.”

“Fuck you.”

He leaves.

You hear him pick up the broom and start sweeping. The waves still crash outside. Birds chirp in the distance. It’s so different from the suffocating quiet in your Talon quarters. You barely notice when your eyes drop, when you fade away into sleep.

When you claw your way back into consciousness, there’s a small tray set up near your bed with a glass and a bowl. You’ve relied on your nanites to feed you for so long that your throat is a desert. The temptation of the water is too much. You drink the water Shimada provided and almost double over from the feeling of cool liquid in your throat. It’s so much. You drain the glass. It’s too much. You press the glass to your face to mimic the pressure of your mask.

The bowl is full of clear broth. You drink that too. Slow sips. You haven’t tasted anything other than your own blood in months. The flavor is like being punched with a pillow. You have to take deep breaths between tastes so that you don’t get overwhelmed.

Shimada’s doing housework in the main room. Folding clothes. You know he’s watching you out of the corner of his eye. You don’t know why he’s doing this to you.

…ok. Maybe you have a suspicion.


	3. Hanamura, Japan; 2062

Your ma used to say: you can take someone out of California, but you can’t take the California out of a person. You would say this is fundamentally true. As much as Genji teases you about it, you’re keeping the ugly scarf Jesse knitted for you wrapped around your face because it’s 50 Farenheight in Japan and you do not intend to freeze to death tonight.

It’s been about a year and a half since an undercover investigation of the yakuza ended in you and Ziegler smuggling a dying teenager out of Japan and everything went cyborg-shaped. You came here hoping for a problem that could be solved with some back alley deals and sniping and ended up having to sneak Zeigler and the kid out of Hanamura and into Okinawa without letting anyone realize you had a limbless yakuza prince in the back of the van. 

That about sums up the shape of your life in Blackwatch.

But that was then. This is now. The Shimadas had split into three sides and were too busy tearing each other apart to deal with other factions taking bites of their territory. You’re here to see how bad the damage is and figure out which dominoes you need to kick over to cause the most devastating power vacuum. That’d let law enforcement and Overwatch clean up the mess.

And to get an update on things for Genji. You know. Theoretically. Not like you do favors for your subordinates or anything. That would be favoritism, and you're a professional.  It's just.  You know.  As long as you're here you might as well check in on his brother.

It’s a dull night. The sky is slate with clouds. Hanamura’s a popular enough tourist spot that you haven’t gotten that many second glances. Your puffy jacket is drab enough to conceal the handgun and Kevlar underneath. You wish you could have brought your shotguns, but you’re trying to stay lowkey.

Your subordinates are checking the docks and the pachinko parlors. You’re hanging around a tourist trap near one of the Shimada safehouses in town; you’ve heard that two sides of the split are trying to get the lone heir, Hanzo, to back them, and that the third wants him gone, and that he’s been unusually silent on the matter of which side he’d support. Your goal is to gently nudge him toward retirement, insomuch as handguns and bribery can be gentle.

Luck is with you tonight. You see a figure in a wheelchair leave the safehouse. You double-check the face you glimpse under a streetlight with a photo Genji forwarded to you.

It’s him.

He goes. You follow.

As rain oozes from the clouds, the streets clear. Nothing good has ever happened outside at 3 in the morning, and tonight is proof of it. Shimada’s wheelchair handles the puddles well enough, but he keeps going through them instead of passing by crowds. He avoids the convenience stores. He’s not brought a raincoat. Something is wrong.

There’s a train line that forms a bridge from Hanamura to a nearby island. The waist-high ledges that protect the train and sidewalks from large waves are painted cherry flower pink; sometimes tourists take boats to see murals that local artists paint there once a month. You duck into a nearby bus station to try and find a train schedule when you see him go up to the tracks; however, instead of crossing the tracks to the train station, he goes onto the sidewalk next to the track and starts wheeling down the bridge.

You read the train schedule a little more urgently.

When you find out that there’s no train scheduled for another three hours, your heart freezes in your chest. You dash out of the train station and run after him with no pretense at stealth.

If he hasn’t realized you’re following him before, he will now. It’s just the two of you on the train tracks over the ocean, and you cut a clean silhouette under the lamps that dot the ledges.

He only stops when the city has become a tiara of light on the horizon. You keep running. He turns to face you and waits until you’re close enough to see him clearly in the searing lamplight. The storm has blurred sea and sky together like the pencil shading in Jesse’s sketches. The only thing more stark than the play of lamplight and dark storm are the highlights and dark hollows of Shimada’s face.

Gone is the clean-cut young man who presided over Genji’s closed casket funeral.  In the last year, his face has become skeletal; he’s skull-white under the lights; his oily hair is drawn up in a messy bun; his stubble is poorly shaven. You can tell he hasn’t been eating by the way the kimono is too big for his body, slipping off one shoulder. The knots tied under the stumps of his knees are sloppy and coming loose.

“I thought that it was considered in bad taste to fold right over left. Only corpses wear it like that,” you say. You have it on Genji’s authority that Hanzo speaks English, so you’re using it to spare him the trauma of your fuckawful accent.

“Am I not going to be a corpse soon?” Hanzo replies.

“Really depends on what you’re planning on doing out here.”

“Who sent you? I know you’re an American. Was it those fools from Las Vegas?”

“There’s a lot of assholes in Vegas. You need to be more specific.”

“Stop playing coy. You wouldn’t have followed me all the way out here if you didn’t plan to kill me.”

“Maybe I’m curious about where you’re going at this time of night. A local would know all the good dives in the city.”

Hanzo scowls. “That was awful.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re not welcome. If you’re here to make bad jokes, then you can leave.”

Hanzo grabs the ledge of the bridge and pulls himself onto it in an acrobatic movement. You walk up next to him and look down. The waves are huge tonight; the crests of waves lick the stone. If you didn’t drown on a night like this, you might get smashed against Hanamura’s cliffs.

“You look like the one who’s planning on leaving,” you say. You splay your hands over the ledge; one of them sits in front of Shimada’s knee. A subtle block. “Is this really how you want to end things?”

“You know nothing of my life. Stay out of my way.”

“Why don’t you tell me about your life so I understand why you’re doing this?”

“I’m not here to play games with an assassin. Either kill me or leave.”

Ok. You didn’t want to come to this, but you can’t think of any other way to make Hanzo listen.

“I was part of the Blackwatch team that stole your brother’s body.”

Hanzo’s head whips to you, the little color he had left draining from his face. For all his bravado, he’s barely older than your Jesse is. “Kisama - ”

“He was alive then,” you continue. “The last thing he told us before his eyes closed was a request that we not hurt you while you retreated.”

“ _Genji_.”

This is far more than you should be saying at all about a Blackwatch operation to a yakuza, but right now your first and only priority is talking this kid off the ledge. If this is what you have to do, so be it.

“I can’t imagine what you must have felt since that day,” you say, “but your brother was thinking about your wellbeing until the end. What would he think if he was here?”

“He would say that I deserve this,” Hanzo whispers.

“That’s not true,” you say gently.

“He would!” Hanzo isn’t crying, but rain gives the illusion of it. His long hair is plastered against his ghostly skin. “I murdered him! And for what? So the family could tear itself apart because I can’t control them? I don’t have their respect. I don’t have the dragons; they haven’t come back to me since I killed – since I – ” He buries his face in his hands and takes unsteady breaths as he tries and fails to compose himself. “Maybe the only thing I ever had was Genji.”

“There must be something you can live for,” you say. He’s so scared. You reach for him and he reaches back, clinging to you as he dry heaves against your jacket. “You’re so young. You don’t deserve to die.”

There’s no one out here but you and him. Beneath the steel wall of your will is a part of you that’s panicking, but. Once again, you’re the only one in the right time and place to make sure a disaster doesn’t happen. That panicking part of you can stay hidden until you’ve done your job.

“Please, help me down. The concrete’s slippery,” he says at last.

A knot in your chest loosens. He’s getting off the ledge. Good. That’s step one.

You help him back into his wheelchair. He spins back towards town as you fish an umbrella out of your pocket and hoist it up over the two of you.

“Why didn’t you get that out earlier?”

“In case I had to catch you,” you explain, and Hanzo reddens and covers his face again with the hand not controlling the wheelchair’s motor. You gently say, “You don’t have to be embarrassed about it. Now, do you have a cell phone on you?”

He nods and gets it out.

“Is there someone you can call and stay with tonight who you’ll feel safe with?”

He nods again and unlocks his phone. Opens up photos. Shows you –

“A baby?”

“Six months old now,” Hanzo rasps. “The father – former yakuza – he died some time ago. I said I’d help. I was intending for my will to. To.” Water drips from his bangs onto the screen. “Adoptive mother is moving tonight. Out of the country. She’s with the anti-dragons. She would accept me giving up my position and defend me from the sides that want me to stay.”

The anti-Hanzo faction, you think. The ones that want to loosen up requirements on who gets to inherit the dragon tattoos and who can lead the yakuza. You wonder if he’s going to them out of a sense of guilt for Genji, or if it was because of a relationship with the child’s father. “Will you move with them?”

“Yes. My supposed victory over my brother is all ashes now. There’s no point in staying here. Let my death be metaphorical; I’ll give up what I have won. I can start over out of the country.”

“That’s a good idea,” you say. “Call them up and tell them to come and get you. I’ll stay with you until they show up.”

“Are you that worried, Mystery-san?” The first hint of a smile shows on Hanzo’s face.

“I have a kid your age.” Jesse was close enough to a kid that it counted, ok? “I’d rather err on the side of caution.”

“So much for Blackwatch’s frightening reputation.”

“All we want is the Shimadas defanged. We get the same effect from you out of the country as from you dead. Even more effect, maybe, because it helps puncture the power vacuum. It’s efficient.”

“What will your boss think?”

I am the boss, you think, and you grin. “What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

“If that’s the risk you’re willing to take.”

“It is. Now, why don’t you go ahead and make that call? Call your own house to tell people where you’re going, too. Let people know where you are, and where you’re going to be.”

Hanzo makes the calls as you walk back into town. You buy him red bean buns at a convenience store, which he devours with the ravenous appetite of someone who almost died. Which, well, he did? You know the feeling pretty well yourself.  

Half an hour of small talk and comfortable silence stretches until a pink SUV rolls up to the curb.

"Shimada-san, do you want to sit up front or in the back?" The woman calls as she scrolls down the window. The words are every bit respectful, but to your ears her tone echoes with an almost fond exasperation. You can see a smile on her face, illuminated by the car's dashboard.

Your ears aren't the only ones to catch her tone - Hanzo looks sheepish when he responds, almost shy. "The back is probably better." He bows from his wheelchair. “Thank you for coming to get me at such an inconvenient time.”

“No problem. I’m the one who’s always cleaning up your messes anyway.”

You raise your eyebrows. She’s acting awfully familiar, considering she’s speaking to a yakuza prince who’s got a bazooka’s worth of firepower tattooed onto his arm. Yet Hanzo remains unphased:: “Once again, I’m in your debt.”

She gets out and helps Hanzo into the back of her SUV; you help her get the wheelchair into the trunk. “Keep a close eye on him, will you?” you murmur to her as you close the back door.

“Of course. Thank you for talking him down. He said he’s taking responsibility for my sister’s kid, so I don’t want to lose him.”

“That’s good.”

Her rain-dripping reflection stares at you. “What do I do if he tries it again?”

“Listen to him. Have him think of things that he can live for. The child. His brother. Maybe – tell him to do a yearly pilgrimage to the gravesite. If he likes a TV show, tell him to hold on to see the next episode. It doesn’t have to be something big as long as he finds meaning in it,” you say. “Hell, tell him that you want him to be around for the kid’s first birthday, then after that, tell him to come for the second birthday…”

She nods stiffly. “I can do that. If I can move out of the country for my child’s health, I can make sure the big child in my car also stays alive.”

You fail to muffle a snort. “Does he know you call him that?”

“I’ve earned the right to it.”

The words come out as solid as a blade. She reminds you of your little sister’s wife, the one who almost fought an elephant seal when it crashed her wedding. Determined.

“Let me give you something as a token of my respect,” you say, and reach into your wallet.

The bribe is a slim gift card loaded with bitcoins. The woman’s eyes twitch as you offer it to her. “Why would you give me this?”

“Consider this a bribe. I was sent here to help gain support for the anti-dragon faction. I was told you were part of it.”

She digests this, then takes the card. “Doing this will be far more effective than letting him die. You’ve made a good choice.”

“Good.”

You stay steady under your umbrella as she gets in the car. Shimada looks small through the window, but there’s something like relief flooding you when you look at him. It’s only when the pink SUV turns the corner and the engine fades into nothing that you finally let exhaustion weaken your knees.

The bench you collapse on has a puddle for your ass. You’ll be lucky if you don’t catch a cold from getting soaked in the bullshit ran, and you feel like someone took an ice cream scoop to your energy.

But job well done. You did your duty. Now that Hanzo’s out of the way, you can stay off your feet until someone reports in on what the rest of the family is doing.

And you can start figuring how the fuck to tell Genji about what happened.


	4. Hanzo's Shed, August 2076

There’s always a couple days of recovery needed after you ‘die.’ Your nanites cannibalize your limbs to stabilize your core and your head, then rebuild the rest of your body. You’re not sure how many of your internal organs you still have, or that still work properly, but what you do know is that when you try and stand again, you barely make it to your knees before they give out under you.

You would really appreciate it if at least one part of your body was in working order. Instead, you’ve got a mouth full of pillow and a head full of fuck.

Shimada is kind enough not to laugh at your pathetic attempts to escape. Instead, he takes your empty bowls without a word and refills them with more water and clear broth

“What’s the point? This isn’t enough calories to sustain me,” you mutter.

“Do you think you can handle hard foods?” Shimada asks without judgement.

You scowl. “I can’t. I told you, I can’t eat. I’m a cyborg.”

“Then how do you feed yourself?”

You shudder. You’re sure this will be enough to get things going ocean-wise. “My nanomachines take cells from fresh corpses and use the materials from them. That’s why I was covered head to toe: so that no one had to see the nanomachines rebuilding me from the muscles up.”

Hanzo doesn’t make a face in a way that means the wheels are turning in his head but he’s trying not to show it. “Do they have to be human corpses?”

“They have to be vertebrates,” you say, and hope he doesn’t ask how you found that out. “And they need to have died under 12 hours before I eat them. But humans are the easiest to find.” You bare your teeth. “They taste the best.”

Hanzo shrugs it off. “You stay there. I have an idea.”

“It’s not like I can go anywhere right now anyway!” you shout after him as he closes the door behind him. Then you sulkily lie back and decide to study the little room Hanzo stuffed you in.

There’s an ancient desktop computer and a fan on a desk. You’re surprised; desktop computers were and are only used by hardcore coders in these decades, and Shimada doesn’t strike you as someone who eats Linux and drinks Java. There are two bookshelves stuffed to the brim: two thirds are manga and comic books with a rainbow of spine illustrations, and the last third look like heavy technical books. You crawl over and pull one out. You can’t read Japanese, but you recognize the pictures of the arcade gambling machines in one of the pages. You recognize the handwriting next to technical diagrams.  Genji used to brag about how he’d gotten his family’s fingers back in all the gambling pies when he was still a yakuza.

Genji.

In the cabinet is clothing you guess is ninja like. In a hidden pocket are some shurikens. Yes, this has to be his room.

You pull one of his shirts out of the drawer and smell it. When he was in Overwatch, he smelled like Mercy’s citrus disinfectant and incense. His old shirt just smells like dust. You don’t know what you expected. You can still smell him if you concentrate hard.

Genji’s incense. McCree’s cigars; Ana’s coffee; Fareeha’s gun oil; the marshmallow shampoo you gave Jack as a joke on every anniversary. Winston’s cloying peanut butter; Amélie’s floral perfume; the ozone smell around Tracer. Mercy’s disinfectant; Torbjorn and his engine oil; Reinhardt’s armor polish.

If you concentrate hard, it’s like they’re actually there. Like you might be home. Like you’re not sobbing into your fake son’s shirt like some kind of freak.

When you hear footsteps, you stuff the shirt under the covers and try to look casual. Shimada returns, his bare chest covered in the faint sheen of sweat. You try not to stare. “What is it?”

“Can you walk yet?”

“No.”

He picks you up like you weigh nothing and carries you back into the living room. He puts you on a green beanbag chair (Genji’s, you think) and then carries a large bucket on a tray over to you. “Try this.”

You peer inside. There’s fish so fresh they’re still wiggling, seagulls with bright red staining their plumage around arrow wounds, a couple crabs, a suspicious looking blue lizard that glares at you.

Well. It’s not like you can die of poison or anything.

You take pity on the lizard and put it on the tray; it scurries away as soon as you let go. (You’re not eating anything that reminds you of Amélie, and this blue, coldblooded thing side-eyeing you is doing a very good job of it.) The rest, however – your skin itches as the nanites boil up under your skin and flood the air like locusts, devouring, filling your flesh up inch by angry inch. Soon, your body’s aches subside to a dull pins and needles sensation as the nanites integrate back into flesh. You feel your thighs and shins, all filled out, your arms whole again – your face, no longer skeletal.

Hanzo doesn’t look disgusted or frightened. In fact, he seems pleased.

“You are my guest. After what you’ve done, I have little reason to threaten you. I’d like to propose an alliance: you give us everything you know about Talon, and we will resettle you in a place that neither Talon nor Overwatch can find you.”

“Information is all you want?”

“Taking the Reaper out of Talon’s hands is effective enough. I assume you want to minimize the chance of returning as much as we don’t want you to go back.”

“That’s true.” You nod. “I only need to gorge on fresh organic material about once a week. Food helps take the edge off, but…”

“A week’s worth of fish in one day? That can be arranged.”

“And you have a place where people won’t mind,” and you gesture down at yourself, the nanites shading your skin to grey in places, eyes black with machines in the whites of your eyes, “all this?”

“We’re in a branch village of the Shimadas,” Hanzo explains. “This is in the internet dead zone; all connections to the internet are through dial-up, so no one can upload your image onto the internet without your consent. This is a small village where everyone who lives here is loyal to me – and since your actions saved the ones who joined me on the tanker, they’ll accept you. If you can adjust to a small town life, I think you’ll be happy here.”

“A small town. How small?”

“A permanent population of around 200, ballooning to 400 around fishing season.”

Smaller than Jack’s rural farm town. Real small. “How far do we have to go to get there?”

“I’ll show you. Do you want to try and walk?”

You wobble to your feet and nod. He helps you walk to the front door, slides it open.

Shimada’s small house is on top of a hill. Your bare feet dig into dark volcanic soil. A dirt road stretches down the hill to a grouping of wooden houses around a crescent shaped bay. You can see spots of green between houses – personal gardens, you’d wager. The tanker you met the yakuza on yesterday (maybe yesterday?) waits in the port alongside small fishing boats.

“You stashed me in your secret yakuza village. You were going to give me a _funeral_ in a secret yakuza village,” you say, disbelieving. “I’m not one of your people!”

“You are now.”

“Madre de dios, save me from stubborn gangsters who cover up all the murders with honor. I’m not one of your –

“Like Talon was any better?”

“You seem to think I had a choice about joining Talon. I was just a toy they found too powerful to throw away when management changed.”

“Do you mean the rumors about Blackwatch funneling funds into Talon?”

“Exactly. Talon hijacked Blackwatch about six months before the incident in Switzerland. Blackwatch started bleeding personnel as some people got too suspicious and disappeared and some people sensed the change and left. Blackwatch was never – we were never good people. But more and more people ended up going to Overwatch as the atmosphere changed. Or they just – went on a mission and never came back.”

“You asked too many questions?” Hanzo asks, quick on the uptake.

“Yeah. I was more useful as a sleeper agent than being killed off. I ended up stumbling where I wasn’t supposed to during Switzerland and became – this.” You flex your hand and let the nanites come thick as swarming gnats. “A corpse kept alive with science.”

“That’s not all you have to be. You can shed one life and live another, as I did,” Hanzo says.

You snort. “And what? Live in this – shed in a fishing village for the rest of my life? Become a yakuza? No thank you.”

"Don't talk about my home like that," Hanzo decrees in a voice almost stern enough to hide his pout.

“Don’t tell me the prince of the Shimadas lives in a shed,” you say, and wobble away from him to get a good look at the house. It’s tiny. How the hell does it have enough room for two people? “This is what all your black market assassin money gets you? What do you do with the rest of it, play the stock market? Buy body pillows?  I know how much it costs for an outsider to hire you.”

And then you trip on your own feet and fall on your face. Shimada cackles. “ _Cállate, puto_!” you snap, but he just laughs harder. When your legs work again you are going to kick his ass.

“Big words from someone who fell like the world’s prettiest piñata,” Shimada says as you roll in the dirt.

“Big words from someone who needed help from the piñata to take down a bunch of scrubs,” you snap back. This kimono’s going to be filthy. You do not care. You try and sort out the heavy cloth around your bare legs so you can stand without tripping on the hem and ignore Shimada’s snickering. “You, you – _ano baka! Anata no tame ni janai_!”

That makes Shimada laugh harder. Fuck, did Genji not explain what that that meant properly?? ‘I didn’t do that to help you’ seemed like an appropriate comment in the situation!

“That’s it. I’m crawling into town.”

Shimada lets you wriggle down the pathway before footsteps echo. Voices in the distance. His face is tight as he picks you up and practically tosses you onto a beanbag. “You wait here.”

“Right. Fine. Thank you,” you deadpan, and wave him away. He’s out the door in seconds. Fuck him, you think.

It is a nice house, in some ways. It’s too bad you can’t leave. Like a bird in a cage – a gilded cage? Does this count as gilded?

You wonder if this is how Genji felt, once upon a time: injured, alone, and helpless in the hands of the strangers who had rescued him. And as you ponder it, your eyelids grow heavy. You’re asleep in minutes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Callate, puto! = Shut up, asshole!
> 
> Ano baka! Anata no tame ni janai! = You idot! It's not like I did that for you! 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading!! My tumblr is plotdesigner.tumblr.com. If you want to talk Overwatch or fic stuff, feel free to drop me a line!


	5. Okinawa Overwatch Base; 2062

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for discussion of cannibalism, mutilation and gore.

The nice thing about not being in the middle of the fucking Omnic Crisis is that you and other soldiers can bring video games into your living quarters if they’re not connected to the internet. Security is lighter. A few people even brought in huge console rigs that could do the new holographic games people liked.

(You have always appreciated the classics. You want to play games to get out of real life, not stay in it. You favor pixelated fantasies to Jack’s realistic shooters.)

So perhaps it’s not surprising that when you knock on the door to Genji’s quarters, you can hear game music pumping through the walls. It’s been a week since you saved his brother’s life. You have both been avoiding this conversation until now.

“Genji-kun, it’s Commander Reyes. Please open the door.”

Genji opens the door, visor up, body stiff. He’s wearing a rumpled sweatsuit over his prosthetics. You get the feeling that he hasn’t slept much

“Reyes-dono, what is it?”

“I know we had the official briefing about the Hanamura incident, but I thought you’d want to hear about what happened with your brother in a non-official setting.”

“I – yes. Thank you.” Genji opens the door further. “Come in. I’m playing some games before bed…”

It looks like one of those visual novel games you used to play in high school. Holographically projected is a blonde woman in a dress and a dark haired maid having a magic battle while a confused man in glasses looks on. You can only make out the most basic of the writing flying between them, but the voice acting gives you a few hints.

“What’s furniture got to do with a fight?” you ask as he waves you over to sit at the game station with him. 

“How many spoilers do you want?” Genji asks.

“All of them. I’m probably not ever going to play.”

“Oh, pity. It’s one of my favorites,” Genji says. “Well, the game tries to trick you into thinking that a servant is ‘furniture,’ but it’s actually an in universe nickname these two use for someone whose body has been so mutilated that they’d be unable to be recognized as a person with their clothing removed.”

The blond shrieks something about _you want the pleasures of being a woman but he’ll never accept you because you’re furniture!!!_ and you wince.

You say: “Relatable?”

“A little. It’s not the same as my problem, but it’s,” and Genji pauses, voice crackling, “similar. An older family member did it to her to keep her from getting in the way of the headship. She’s taken away and raised by others, but her complicated feelings of both love and hate for her family leads her to attempt murder-suiciding against them all – Reyes, don’t give me that look. I’m not going to do anything like that. That’s why you didn’t let me go to Hanamura, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, kid, that’s why,” you rasp.

First of all, it was departmental policy not to send minors onto the battlefield; secondly, it was departmental policy not to send people to fight their own families; thirdly, it was not departmental policy to let someone with such a low security clearance go on a high stakes mission; fourthly, you were not going to send the kid back into the place you’d scooped him out of only two months after he’d gotten out of the hospital.

Blackwatch is illicit as hell, but you still have standards. Low standards, but they were still standards. Standards like not compromising operations and not sending sad 18 year olds back to the town that killed them.

“You’re one of us now,” you say as Genji exits to the menu. “I’m not sending you on a mission to have a nervous breakdown.”

“I appreciate that,” Genji says. “You’re always thinking about me, Reyes-dono.”

“As your commanding officer, it’s my job,” you reply gruffly.

“Not just like that,” Genji says. “I mean.” His thumbs circle the joysticks. “You’ve let me into this place as if I wasn’t just an informant who got fucked up trying to escape. The medical care has been phenomenal. I have never wanted for affection here, even though I miss. I miss them.” A laugh crackles through him. “Isn’t that messed up? My own family turned me into this _thing_ , and I miss them.”

“It’s not messed up,” you say softly. “It’s hard, Genji.”

"He murdered me. They ordered my death," Genji says. He hits LOAD, scrolling down to a save point you've seen him play before. This time, the blonde in the dress is confronting a redhead – _I've made a meal out of the people you hate the most! After devouring your siblings, the dessert course is the daughter you resented! Eat up every bite of the daughter you loathed so much!_

_Nooo! I love my daughter! Don't make me eat her!_

"Why do I keep missing him, when he did this to me? Why can't I move on?"

 “They’re your family. Even when they hurt you, it can be hard to accept that.” You’ve seen Genji doing target practice down at the shooting range, muttering the names of family members one by one as he peppers the target with holes. You’ve also seen him feverish in the hospital, calling for his parents and brother in his distress. It’s hard, being in love with the people who hurt you.

In your opinion, the majority of them can rot. The Shimadas were dangerous, and you had orders from above to take them out, but that wasn’t the main reason you went to Hanamura to knock down dominoes until their game started falling apart.

(That wasn’t the reason you’d made a beeline for Hanzo Shimada, either. You had wanted to see the man who had turned Genji into little more than ground meat and blood.)

“I know. I know,” Genji says. He jams his thumb into buttons to make text scroll, to make the redhead mother scream about how she hadn’t wanted _this,_ how she could be furious but she hadn’t intended _this_. “We’re off topic. What happened with my brother?”

“I’ll speak frankly,” you say. “When I found him, he was contemplating suicide. The guilt from your ‘death’ and the pressure of keeping the family together had become too much. I convinced him to leave the Shimada family and support the no-headship faction instead, and to stay alive.”

“Good,” Genji says. “Good.”

You blink and run through the sentence in your head again. “Good that he felt guilty, or good that I stopped him?”

“Both,” Genji says. “I – I don’t want him to die. But I don’t want him to be happy either. I want him to suffer and – and to think about what he did every day. I want him to live so I can beat an apology out of him when I’m ready. I want to see his face – I want to - ”

He drops the controller and taps the buttons on the back of his neck that make air hiss, depressurize his visor, expose what’s left of his human face. His eyes are red and puffy from tears. He’s been crying long before you came to his room. His visor drops from shaking fingers.“Gabe, what’s wrong with me?”

“Nothing, Genji.” You offer your arms and he takes the offer, hugs you as tightly as his new limbs allow. You hug him back. You have never had children but you imagine it would feel like this. “There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s ok.”

He cries. You hold him. Time passes.

(In the future, you remember how his room smelled like Zeigler’s disinfectant and shrimp potato chips. You remember how his prosthetics were warm to the touch from the machinery working within. You even remember the melodramatic pipe organ background music. That nerd. That stupid kid. Even back then, he was too nice –

“ Reaper-dono – take him alive - ”

Too good for your own good. As if you deserved to be taken alive after everything you’ve done. What had you done to deserve such a loyal subordinate?)

You end up leaving after some small talk, after Genji’s emotions wind back down. You’ll be back tomorrow. And the next day. And the next.

You’ll be around as long as your subordinates (your family) need you. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the late update! RL happened. I also need to apologize in advance - the next update won't be until September 30 for schoolwork reasons. I hope you don't mind the wait and come back when the next chapter comes out! Thank you so much for continuing reading!


	6. Hanzo's Video Game Shack, August 2076

You wake up, body heavy with sleep, and are disgusted out of pure habit. You haven’t slept this much in years upon years. And when you try to sit up, your body has the audacity to groan like a rusted door and buckles almost at once.

Even worse, it seems that Shimada moved you back to your bed and wrapped you in blankets. How domestic. Your face heats up with what must be shame.

Hanzo has left you water again. Your mouth feels like someone has dried it out with cotton balls. You drink deeply. It’s lukewarm. It’s more than you’ve had in years (ha, since – whenever you were last awake with Shimada). Every drop makes your throat feel like the rust inside you is peeling off, leaving smooth metal behind. Water dribbles down your lips and drops into the hollow of your throat. Even that is overwhelming. Even that makes goosebumps prickle all over your body.

What happened to make your body so sensitive? The kimono, though lighter than your armor, is damp with sweat. The heavy fabric clings to your skin. You should ask Shimada if you can have a change of clothing.

You wobble to your feet, then stumble out of Genji’s room. You can hear Shimada clanking in the main room – it turns out he’s connected an ancient GamePlaytion 180 to an even older TV and is trying to get the sound to work.

“Did you try the red cable yet?” you ask as you gracefully flop down next to Shimada. “That always gave Genji a hard time.”

“Already tried.”

“Did you put it in the green port?”

He hesitates, then swaps two wires around. The jingle of the GamePlation 180’s home screen begins ringing.

“I told you so,” you say, and drag the beanbag over so you can sit on it. “Why are you even getting this fossil out of storage?”

“I thought you’d want something to do when I start going back into town,” Shimada explains as he puts in USBs and sets up controllers. “You do play games, don’t you?”

“Not since I joined Talon,” you say. “The living weapon doesn’t really get R&R. My life was nothing but tending a garden of death.” You grin at him. “But I doubt I’m that out of practice.”

Shimada gives you a look before handing you a controller. “Then let’s see you put money where your mouth is.”

You flip over the controls, finding the X and Y buttons, thumbing the D-pad. “We ended up buying one of these for Genji once he was lucid in the hospital. Spending all that time with nothing but your head – you’ll turn inside out.”

“Start wearing a skull mask? Quote ancient American songs while in a battle of life and death?”

“Like the nudist is one to talk,” you shoot back.

“The dragons refuse to be confined by clothing,” Hanzo retorts.

You ignore his cocky little smirk to test out the controls. There’s a little sprite on the menu pointing a little dragon at each icon you touch. Going by the green hair and the stereotypical ninja outfit, there’s only one person it can be. “Did he program this one too?”

“Too?” Hanzo’s eyes flicker to the Genji sprite on the screen. “Did he program his GamePlation in the hospital?”

“He did. Tried to convince the Overwatch heads to let him in by hacking into the Overwatch firewall.”

Hanzo’s eyebrows raise. “Tried? Not succeeded?”

“We didn’t connect the GamePlation to our wifi. We’re not that incompetent. However, he got into a good third of the hospital staff’s phones. Kid was always a smartass.” You recognize most of the games loaded on this thing – Genji bought copies of them on base.

Wait. Shit. If Genji was talking to Hanzo now, and – it’s been at least 18 hours since you “died” and came back, since the sun is setting through the windows and you woke up this morning -

A chill spreads through you despite the summer heat. You slowly turn to Hanzo. “Does Genji know - ?”

“About you?” Hanzo finishes your sentence for you. “What he knows right now is that I brought your body here for a funeral. Whether he learns of your survival or not is up to you.”

“You’re not going to make me see him? You could truss me up as a present and bring me to him. He’d – probably be happy.” You think. You aren’t sure. You’ve seen him a few times on the job, but you usually don’t try and fight him. He’s usually busy fighting that ancient Bastion unit Talon jury-rigged to counter the one Overwatch has, anyway.

“Given that you would rather have died than be given to Overwach, I thought it would be ill-advised to bring you there once you came back to life,” Hanzo says. “Either you’d kill yourself or kill someone else trying to get out, and that would definitely upset Genji.”

“That’s fair.” You don’t turn to watch Hanzo, but you tilt your head so you can watch him without looking like you’re watching. “You told him that I was dead. How’d he react?”

“He was unhappy. He had hoped you could be recovered alive.  Genji thought that after your interactions with Soldier 76, there was a chance you could be convinced to defect.”

“76 is a dumbshit whose idiocy is only eclipsed by his ego,” you say; your hands shake around the controller.

“Genji said that he came to Overwatch after your last encounter and begged for their help to contact you again.”

 _Thunk_! The controller drops from your shaking hands.

“He _what_?” The words are out of your mouth before you can stop them. “I t-told him – “ Your teeth chatter against each other. You slap your hand against your jaw to make it stop clattering. “I told him not to interfere,” you say through your fingers. “I told him – what the hell is he doing back at Overwatch?”

Hanzo’s brow furrows. “Is he a friend of yours?”

“No! Absolutely not!”

This is not a topic you want to talk about. This is not a topic you want anyone to talk about. No. You’re changing the topic. You pick a game icon at random and load it.

The screen lights up with a pachinko screen. In the background is a logo made from a U and a W, and vaguely familiar cartoon characters shoot guns in the background.

You squint at the bright English writing that hiragana is scribbled over. “UnderWatch?”

“It’s a project Genji was working on the summer before he – left the family,” Hanzo says. “Overwatch was still a popular franchise back then, so the game company our company funded made a ripoff we’d unveil in Hanamura in the summer.”

“We’re a franchise, huh?” you mutter. It’s nice to hear him being so objective about Overwatch being a cash cow when Jack Morrison is giving you a big blue-eyed stare from the menu and making your heart beat staccato in your chest. Like the sight of him isn’t enough to push your chill from horrified anticipation to straight up icy horror.

 You click random strings of kanji and what you assume is a character select. There’s Jack, as beautiful as the day you killed each other; there’s you, looking much more handsome than you know you ever were; and then there’s –

“Ana Iroha,” you read, and look up at Amari glorious in middle age. The art style makes her look younger than she would have been when the game came out, but she still has a hawkish nose and eyes that piece right through you. You click buttons until a game starts and then slam buttons to try and figure out how this stupid game works.

“Do you want directions?” Hanzo asks. His voice is delicate; you can hear the _are you alright_ hidden inside his question, a razor in a candied apple.

“I don’t need your help,” you reply. You start angling the thumbpad to make the little balls stream across the screen faster. “I can do this on my own. Nothing is wrong.”

“If you say so,” Hanzo says politely. “If you want to be alone, I’ll go make dinner.”

“Go,” you mutter. You don’t watch him leave. You let your attention sink into the movements on the screen, on Ana’s face lighting up the world around her as she does decorative rifle tosses and snipes Bastion units as you drop balls into holes.

Time passes. Genji’s copy of this game, you discover, has an option to let you keep going even if you lose. You keep going. Ana is radiant in the game, alive, beautiful.

You have missed her for eleven years now, but you haven’t missed her so painfully in a long time. You barely had time to mourn her in Blackwatch, and even less when Talon took you.

The scent of green tea drifts from the kitchen. It’s nothing like Ana’s super-strong Turkish coffee. You can swear you can taste it now. The actress they got to voice Ana in this game is good, very good, close enough –

You remember: The first time she made you that coffee, you almost spat out the first sip. It was too strong. Jack gave you a smug look as he sipped his, gloating about how his simple farm upbringing made him used to strong, strong coffee.

“Ah, but it’s as black as my soul,” you retorted. “Of course you want it in your mouth.”

That pulled a scandalized laugh from Jack and an entertained one from Ana. They were both so young in those days – _you_ were so young. All of you were.

The screen blurs as liquid leaks from your eyes. It can’t be tears – you won’t let it be tears – it’s no doubt some kind of nanomachine discharge, a symptom of your recovery – you grit your teeth and swivel the controls under your thumbs, trying to get the high scores that make Ana pop up with little animated scenes. Sniper battle with you. Jack throwing her up a building. A recreation of her and Fareeha leading a parade in Egypt. You used to have pictures of that up in your apartment.

Hanzo doesn’t say a word as you malfunction in his living room. Maybe he can’t hear you in the kitchen. Maybe he can and just doesn’t care. _You_ don’t care. You can’t do anything. She’s dead and gone and all you have left is this shitty cartoon gambling game with her face plastered all over it.

In fact, he doesn’t speak at all when he sits next to you and sets down a cup of fresh green tea. You sip it and promptly burn your tongue. It’s a good excuse for the moisture on your face. The flavor here is the same as those disgusting milkshakes Genji used to make in the rec rooms. That makes your eyes leak more.

Ana had helped Genji get used to his artificial hands. Stretching exercises. Basic stuff, like holding chopsticks and catching a ball. Then helping Fareeha with her homework by writing stuff. Dexterity training by cleaning guns. Genji had fallen into Jesse’s bad habit of calling her Ma, of calling you Dad. He still specialized in using a sword so he could use the bazooka tattooed onto his arm, but you taught him how to use a pistol in case of trouble. Helped him learn how to aim. You lost a bet to him and dyed your hair green for it, and he perked up a lot from it.

Stupid. Green. Ninja. Kid.

“Let me guess. This is Genji’s?” you ask, and you sip the tea again. “He asked us to buy a year’s supply of this stuff before we transferred him to an American hospital. I think we still had a couple cartons lying around when Overwatch was terminated.”

“We drink green tea like Americans drink coffee,” Hanzo replies with a hint of reproach. “This is my tea.”

“Oh,” you say.

“However, we drink the same brand of tea,” Hanzo adds with a grin.

You gape at him, then wipe your face and glare back at him. “You little shit.” You can’t help the corners of your mouth curving up. “You’re just as terrible as his stories say.”

“Good.” Hanzo drinks his tea. “…Did he talk about me often?”

“All the time. Poor kid didn’t know whether he was going to kill you or drag you out of the clan with him.” You pick up the controller and exit out of the level. You should clear your head. See if there’s any levels with people you don’t care about. “It took a few weeks for it to really sink it. He said the fight lasted about 20 seconds because your dragons nailed him through the wall before you finished things.”

“Ideally, a yakuza fight shouldn’t take more than a minute to end, otherwise you’re doing something wrong.”

“Especially if it’s a sniper versus a swordsman.” You set your tea down. “And then you came in to finish the job, but you couldn’t. I mean, if you wanted him 100% dead, you’d have cut his head off with that shitty sword instead of just gutting him.”

“It was – a gesture of tradition. And then I thought he was dead, and it would be cruel to dismantle his body further,” Hanzo says.

“Just leave it to the people who are disposing of the body, right?” You manage a grin when he flinches. “That’s what ended up saving him. Good job, you didn’t finish the job.”

“And you said I was a shit,” Hanzo mutters darkly.

“I’m an assassin. You’re an assassin. We’re bad people,” you say. You click at your controller until what used to be your own face stares back at you. You press play. “He was a good guy, while he was at Overwatch. Sweet kid. Eager as a puppy to please. Smart as hell. You’d think that losing everything up to the shoulder and down to the knee would have knocked him off balance, but he was still far more chipper than I would have been.”

The man who was once you poses. Angelic wings superimpose over his shoulders. It’s like getting punched in the gut. You aim metal balls at his face and wait for Hanzo to reply.

He doesn’t.

“It took him about four months to get out of the hospital, after dealing with the organ damage and putting his initial cybernetics in. Couldn’t eat anything but broth, jello and popsicles for two months. I’ve never met a man who hated jello more than he did.” A cutesy scene plays out where Fareeha tackles you and forces you to give her a piggy back ride. Someone had put one of Overwatch’s rare days off on Youtube and it had gone viral. The internet never forgot.

“He was sweet,” you repeat. The corpse of yourself onscreen destroys an omnic with a shotgun. “It seems he finally decided to forgive you instead of killing you. If that makes him happy, then I’m happy.”

“You don’t sound happy.”

“That’s just my face. And my voice. And my everything.” You pause the game as soon as it stops showing your face. “Look. I’m – fucked up, ok? I’m glad you and Genji made up, but it’s hard to just roll over and smile for the guy who almost killed him. I’m grateful, but I’m not – I can’t forget you did that.”

“I suppose that makes sense,” Hanzo says. “You’re only human.”

You bark a laugh. “Nice attempt at comfort! But I never have been.”

Hanzo’s body language is confident, challenging, but his voice comes out small. “Then why did you save me that time?” He only meets your gaze when he is done speaking

Because I don’t let people kill themselves, you think. Even now that he’s a burly assassin who could snap your neck with one hand, you can still see the vulnerable young man you coaxed off a bridge – and you wonder if he suspects the same vulnerability from you.

You’ll have to nip that sort of thinking in the bud.  “At that time, Genji either wanted to let you live freely without involving you in his new life, or he wanted to kill you with his own hands." You shrug flippantly and make your tone light, as if whether he lived or died that night had never really mattered to you. "Killing you would make both of those difficult for him.”

Some of the vulnerability in Hanzo fades away; his tone is firm when he replies. “That’s not how I remember it.”

“No?”

“You were never so cold back then.”

“It’s called being professional; in private, I’m as cold as they come.” You smile beatifically. “I am death itself come to life.” If this were one of Genji’s games, there would be a little heart ending your text box right now.

“Death itself generally doesn’t convince people _not_ to kill themselves. Death doesn’t cry over their dead comrades, either.”

In a spasm of sudden manic energy, you slam your fingers against the controller until the game pauses. Your corpse’s face smiles back at you. Hanzo flinches back as if you had hit him.  “I’m not! This is a simple malfunction of tear ducts! There is nothing human left!”

But Hanzo doesn’t let up despite the scare. “Someone who wasn’t human wouldn’t feel so strongly about this issue.”

“Of course I would! I told you before, I’m a nanomachine colony piloting a corpse! I only look human because I’ve fed recently. As my body goes through fresh tissues, they begin to die and slough off until all that’s left is bone and sinew being moved by nanites. Whenever I die, whenever I regenerate, whenever I move, I feel them buzzing inside me, eating me from the inside out as they keep me alive.” Your mouth curves up over your teeth in a grotesque imitation of a smile. You’re fine. Everything is fine. Your bones are buzzing with a million million nanomachines inside you and you are fine. “Human? The only human thing here is the corpse I inhabit!”

“What, so someone else decided you’d wear a skull mask and quote classic rock all the time?”

“I – ” Hanzo is not reacting and that is wrong, and that is not how you expected this conversation to go. “That’s not the point! I have to have fun somehow!”

“So is that the nanomachines talking?”

“I’m not – ” Something inside you breaks, spews hot oil through your body. You throw the controller at the screen, at your old face, and spin to scream at him. Your voice grates your throat into pieces. “There’s nothing left! _He’s_ dead, ok? _He_ died and _he’s_ never coming back!”

Hanzo says nothing. He looks at you with a face of terrible pity. You hate him with every inch of your boiling body. You curl over as if hit in the gut and wheeze for breath, and he takes you into his arms as if you were a weeping child.

Pathetic. You hate yourself as much as you hate him and no matter how you wheeze, you can’t stop crying.

The panchinko game jingles in the background. “Do you want this off?” Hanzo asks.

“No!!” you shout. Then, softer: “No. I haven’t seen their faces in so long. It hurts, but I want to see them again.”

“You shouldn’t hurt yourself with their images.”

“I’m not – it’s not like that.” It is like that. “I just – if I avoid Morrison and Reyes, the rest should be fine.”

Hanzo gives the screen with your corpse’s face an odd look, then exits out of the game mode. “Do you wish to talk about it?”

“What, and give up classified secrets? As if.”

“Classified by what? Overwatch? It’s gone. Talon? You defected.”

You rub at your eyes. “This is a trick. I can’t just – tell you this shit. You’ll use it.”

“Against who? The majority of Overwatch is dead, and the ones left are allied with Genji, who I’m not going to harm. I already did that. And the goal is to avoid Talon, isn’t it?”

“Stop being so fucking logical.” You let him help you back into the beanbag. You don’t even remember falling off. The game had sucked you in. “Fine, I guess…fine. But you have to tell me about what Genji’s doing now.”

“Information for information? Fair enough.”

“And in the spirit of being a generous and welcoming yakuza leader, you get to go first,” you say.

Hanzo huffs, but he seems amused rather than annoyed.

“Genji is alive and healthy. He contacted me last year, and has been trying to get me to join his Overwatch for some time. I haven’t joined, but we collaborate now and then against mutual enemies.”

“Like Talon?”

“Like Talon.”

You manage to smile. Some of the icy self-loathing melts away. “I found his tip off on the phone you left in the ambush. He sounded happier than when we last saw each other.”

“He is. I’m still surprised he thinks I’m worth saving.”

“You and me both. For me and for you. If you’re not redeemable, how the hell would I ever be?” You try and play it off as a joke, but Hanzo doesn’t smile.

You sigh. “I’m a former Blackwatch agent. My name – is Reaper now. The name of this body doesn’t matter. Talon used me as a double agent during the Switzerland attacks.”

“Used?”

“Talon’s not much for agent recruitment. They prefer brainwashing to actually hiring good help. I’m not as bad off as I used to be, but it’s still – they’ll fuck me up if they find me. They’ll fuck you up if they find me.” You grab his wrist. “I couldn’t let them do to you what they did to me and Amélie – they’d grind you up until there’s nothing of Hanzo left and then reconstitute the ashes until the corpse came back. They turn you into nothing. There’s nothing left.”

Hanzo does not look as alarmed as he should be. He should be afraid. Everyone should be afraid of Talon. “What did I just say?!” you snap.  “Shimada! Tell me what I just said, soldier!”

He gives you a surprised look. “Don’t get caught by Talon?”

“Don’t get caught by Talon! Do not! If they show up here, you have to go hide! I’ll stall them, so don’t get caught!”

You shake his arm, trying to get the information through his thick skull.

He stays too calm. “Reaper, they can’t find us here. I took out all of your tracking microchips. This island isn’t on any maps.”

“It’s not fine! It’s not, it’s not – don’t look at me like that, I’ve been in Talon for eleven years! I know what they can do!” You take a deep, deep breath. “Take this seriously, Shimada. Talon’s been bleeding recruits and resources for years, and they wouldn’t hesitate to force everyone in this village to join them. More and more people are on to their bullshit. You know the States listed them as a terrorist organization until last year? And ever since Civil War 2: We Didn’t Actually Do It, they’ve let all kinds of shit go through if the militia was based on ‘making America great again.’”

“Reaper, it’s called the dissolution now. How much modern news did you have access to?”

You groan. "I don't even know anymore. I only get these kinds of details when the higher ups want to complain and take it out on  us agents. All I know is we're losing money from those spineless cowards who had the baton passed to them from the bigoted scumsacks who threatened to make a Neo-Confederacy, that there's some overconfident idiot in Texas trying to blackmail our organization's top brass, and everyone is pissed off that there are tin cans, I mean omnics, starting to integrate into human society." You fall limp in the beanbag and try and massage something like stoicness back into your face. “Fuck. Did they ever come out and say Overwatch crumbled because of the dissolution? Because that’s what happened. There were enough sore losers that they started looking for any pies with pieces ripe for the taking.”

"It was never voiced aloud, but we all suspected it," Hanzo says, taking the controller and exiting out of the game; Underwatch's title screen is quickly replaced by the bland color palette of the default game screen. "After all of Overwatch's meddling in criminal affairs - from the way your men broke the spine of the Deadlock Gang's weapons' trafficking operation to your failed efforts to destroy my family's organization - it was clear that leaders with an interest in something more covert than the United Nations was giving the orders. We knew it wasn’t just the Americans giving orders, but your targets were too haphazard to pinpoint your hidden commander.”

“That’s because there wasn’t just one,” you mutter. You’re not even going to touch ‘failed to destroy the Shimadas,’ not when there’s so much more information you have to deal with, but you are keeping it to prod him with later. “We actually dealt with a lot of shit from organized crime working through politicians before Talon happened. It was the 24K that time. They blackmailed the Chinese ambassador to the UN Security Council into getting rid of their competition on the shipping routes in the Eastern Sea. Genji figured it out about two years after he left the Shimadas, and he went off to deal with them himself a few months before the Americans showed up to meddle.”

“Talon?”

“Talon,” you confirm. You feel like his gaze is shredding through the dead skin you have layered over your vulnerable core. “Pathetic, isn’t it? This corpse used to be someone great. Now it’s this sniveling mess.”

“You know, the Shimadas would love to have a sniveling zombie on the team,” Shimada says lightly.

Something halfway between a laugh and a sob chokes out of you. “You’re the same opportunistic shithead he was. Yes, recruit the living corpse into the yakuza.”

His careful expression melts a little. “Would you be willing to talk about him? What was he like in Overwatch?”

It’s a topic change from the yakuza, and from your nature. You take it willingly. “It’s been eleven years since I’ve seen him properly, but I have some stories. They’re not as fresh as you and him meeting, but I suppose you’d want to hear about them?”

“Yes.” With the vehemence in his tone – you wonder if this was the real reason he saved you. Information on the brother he loved and hated in the same breath.

You nod and make yourself comfortable on Genji’s old green beanbag. “Well, then…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for waiting for this one! This fic is currently going to be updating once every two weeks until further notice. (school, why this...) 
> 
> Also, Ana's name was changed to Ana Iroha in the UnderWatch game so that the Shimadas could avoid copyright issues. I-ro-ha is the equivalent of the english ABC. Gabe ends up staring at Chief Commando UnderWatch and Archangel Gabriel later on.


End file.
